The
Kentucky Supreme Court on Thursday upheld Jefferson County Public
Schools’ ability to decide where to assign students to school, rejecting
a legal challenge by parents who argued that state law gives their
children the right to attend the nearest school.

The
5-2 ruling marks a defeat for advocates of neighborhood schools, who
hoped that the court would toss out a controversial student-assignment
system that aims to integrate schools by race, income and education
levels in part by requiring some students to attend more distant
schools.

“Kentucky public school students have
no statutory right to attend a particular school,” the majority opinion
said. “Student assignment within a school district in Kentucky is a
matter that the legislature has committed to the sound discretion of the
local school board.”

At issue was a state law
that says “within the appropriate school district attendance area,
parents or legal guardians shall be permitted to enroll their children
in the public school nearest their home.” Passed in the 1970s as an
attempt to sidestep a federal desegregation order, it was ruled
unconstitutional while the order was place. But that order has since
been lifted.

The parents suing the district
contended that the term “enroll” also means their children have the
right to attend the closest neighborhood school.

Byron
Leet, an attorney for the district, has argued that the legislature
removed the word “attend” from the statute in 1990 to ensure that
districts were allowed to make assignment decisions — not, as plaintiffs
had contended, to clean up redundant language.

“We
are certainly grateful for Kentucky's highest court confirming that the
trial court was absolutely correct in dismissing this lawsuit,” Leet
said.

The ruling ends the latest skirmish in a
long-running battle over student assignment.

Critics of the district’s
plan, including attorney Teddy Gordon, who has represented legal
challengers in most court cases, argue it requires unnecessarily long
and expensive bus rides and hasn’t reduced racial achievement gaps.

“All
the parents in this case were courageous to take on the school system,
and even though they did not win this round, they have made JCPS turn
the corner, away from the outdated social experiment of busing,” Gordon
said, referring to recent changes the district has made to reduce
bus-ride times.

When the case was argued before
the state’s highest court in April, the district argued that a right to
attend the nearest school would be difficult, if not impossible, to
implement, with Leet saying that “because of where buildings are and
populations aren't, everyone can't attend the closest school.”

The
Jefferson County Teachers Association, the League of Women Voters, the
Kentucky School Boards Association, Fayette County Schools and a handful
of parents all joined amicus briefs on behalf of the school system.

They
argued that giving parents a right to attend the closest school would
put unreasonable burdens on districts. They said elected school boards
should be able to make assignment decisions.

And
some groups like the NAACP of Louisville argued that because local
housing patterns remain economically and racially segregated in many
areas, a ruling giving children the right to attend their nearest school
would resegregate schools in a way that could create inequities.

The battle over student assignment dates back decades.

The
school board has been making changes and adjustments to its student
assignment plan since 2007, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the
district's decades-old desegregation policy, saying it relied too
heavily on individual students' race when assigning them to schools.

The
board adopted a new plan in 2008 that looked at race, income and
education levels of students' neighborhoods when assigning children to
schools.

But it has spent the past four years making changes to
that plan after hearing numerous complaints from parents over long bus
rides and the lack of access to neighborhood schools.

Student
assignment has become an increasingly polarizing issue, as well as a
political one. Several state politicians have incorporated it into their
campaigns, including last year's Republican gubernatorial candidate,
Sen. David Williams.

A new version of the
district's student assignment plan took effect in elementary schools
this fall. The new system classifies the district's 570 census areas
using three categories based on income, minority population and average
adult education.

Earlier this year, the board
changed the plan again, voting to shake up the elementary clusters to
further reduce the time students spend on buses. The latest change
raises the number of elementary clusters for the 2013-14 school year
from six to 13, but it also curtails the number of schools parents can
choose from — from roughly 14 schools per cluster to six each.

Some
desegregation advocates fear that could undermine the district's
integration efforts, particularly in western Louisville, by giving
minority and low-income families fewer school choices.

The high court's ruling upholds the plan currently in use by
Louisville's school district about how students are assigned to schools
across the county. Justice Lisabeth Hughes Abramson wrote that state law
is clear that school districts across Kentucky have the authority to
distribute students throughout the district based on what the school
board sees as the best method...

"Indeed, every single school board has to know its district and make
decisions that are best suited to its student population," Abramson
wrote for the five-member majority of the court.

Abramson wrote that the plaintiffs in the case may use the ballot box to change the plans...

Justice Bill Cunningham, joined by Justice David Venters, dissented,
saying the state law that requires enrolling a student in a school also
gives the student the right to attend the school of their choice.

"As
hard as I try, I cannot read the statute in any way other than in its
plain meaning," Cunningham wrote. "And, if we ask a thousand people what
is meant by the term 'enroll in,' I vouch that every single person
would say it includes the right to attend."

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Chicago's 350,000 public school kids will
return to classes Wednesday following agreement by striking teachers to
end their walkout after seven days.

Teacher
union delegates voted in a private meeting Tuesday to suspend the strike
after considering details of a tentative contract presented over the
weekend. The contract still awaits approval from the full 25,000-member
union, but teachers will return to work immediately, union President
Karen Lewis said.

She said the union's more than 700 delegates voted 98% to 2% to return to work.

The
move heads off a confrontation with Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a former chief
of staff to President Obama who on Monday tried to force an end to the
strike in the nation's third largest school district. Emanuel called the
agreement "an honest compromise."

The walkout had halted classes for students just after they had wrapped up summer vacation and started their academic year.

The
strike focused attention on teacher complaints about evaluations and
job security, echoing a larger national debate over public education, as
well as pay...

Monday, September 17, 2012

When schools reopened last month, some in Eastern Kentucky began the
second year of a grand education experiment that has been going on in
underprivileged school districts across the nation for 20 years but
which came to Appalachia only a year ago.

Teach for America recruits talented college seniors from highly ranked
universities, gives them their first training as teachers, and makes
them available to schools that are willing to hire them. This year it
has 36 teachers in 20 schools in 11 Eastern Kentucky districts.

In Appalachian Kentucky, the coming of TFA teachers has stirred hope
that their sharp minds, youthful energy, diverse backgrounds and fresh
perspectives are invigorating rural schools where most teachers are
natives who went to the nearest college – and giving fresh promise to
the idea that education is the key to economic progress in the region.

“Any time you challenge the status quo – ‘the man’ – any time you
challenge the man, you’re gonna put pressure on the whole system to do
better,” said Terry Holliday, the state commissioner of education.

But TFA has its critics, and to some, it is just the most recent
incarnation in a long series of well-intentioned but naive outsiders who
try to help Appalachians who never asked for it; privileged, bored,
20-somethings who want to fight a war without dodging bullets.

Morehead State University Education Dean Cathy Gunn, who doesn’t support
TFA, said some of its teachers might think “It will look good on my
resume, and I want to take a break, and it’s like the Peace Corps.”

Lois Combs Weinberg and Alix Smith

People in the region have seen similar programs since the War on Poverty
began in the mid-1960s; while some volunteers from outside the region
stayed, most left. “People would say that they ‘popped in, popped off,
and popped out’,” says Lois Combs Weinberg, who was a VISTA (Volunteer
In Service To America) and whose father, Bert Combs, was governor from
1969-73.

But unlike some such programs, TFAers don’t organize. They don’t
picket. In fact, they’re media-shy: Getting interviews with some of
them was a challenge. They’re here to teach, and they want to make
clear that TFA – at least as an organization – is here to stay for the
long term.

“It’s basically been a boom and bust cycle of people coming in and
leaving,” says TFA corps member Alix Smith, who teaches in Lynn Camp
High School at Corbin. “Our goal here with TFA is to get the boom
without the bust.”

TFA’s careful efforts at community integration seem to be working, based
on interviews with some Eastern Kentucky citizens. “At first we were
skeptical, but they won us over in the end,” one said. “Every one of
them would have faced down hell with a water pistol if they thought it
would help their kids.”

Principal Robbie Fletcher of Sheldon Clark High School in Inez shared a
similar story about a TFA teacher. Several students’ parents “called me
and wanted their kids out of her class,” he said. And inside that
class, some students were equally irate, saying things like “I don’t
know how things work wherever it is you came from, but this is just not
the way we do things around here.” But in the end, Fletcher said, the
teacher won them over, parents included –“except one,” he says, “and the
pope himself couldn’t have converted that one.”

Another reason for TFA’s success is that it is meeting real needs. Many
schools in Appalachia don’t have qualified teachers in foreign
languages, special education or the sciences. TFA is filling desks that
would otherwise be vacant or filled with long-term substitutes.

There’s another difference between TFA and past programs, too: 50 years
of academic research. “TFA is specific. It’s much more targeted work,”
says Weinberg. “With VISTA, we really didn’t know what [the
volunteers] were doing,” she says. “We sent them there to ‘do good’ and
gave them no training.” TFA now has a much more “sophisticated
conceptual framework,” she says, “We now know that education equals
economic development.”

Even if TFA members don’t see themselves as directly fighting poverty,
they still are very much part of the poverty war, says University of
Kentucky economist Ken Troske, who runs the Kentucky Center for Business
and Economic Research.

“If you can just raise education levels in Eastern Kentucky,” Troske
says, “you could eliminate almost all of the region’s problems because
low education levels are responsible for poverty, poor health, smoking,
obesity, crime, drug use.”
Troske says TFA doesn’t have to work miracles: “Even if you can raise
these kids’ achievement by just 1 or 2 years of quality-adjusted
education, you can start to see some real results in these other
metrics.”

There was skepticism that TFA could get the political support needed to
open a region in Appalachia and start placing teachers. A starting
teacher in Eastern Kentucky makes upward of $30,000 a year in a region
where the per capita income is approximately half that, so local demand
for teaching jobs is strong. But the need for qualified teachers
overcame the politics.

“Right now TFA is very targeted in rural settings where they just can’t
find the teachers,” Holliday said. He hopes to broaden the impact by
making it a catalyst for better teacher quality throughout the state.

While TFA is a national program, its teachers are employed locally, at
the same salary locals would have been paid. “None of the hiring/firing
processes were taken away,” said Phil Rogers, who was executive director
of the state Education Professional Standards Board until he retired
this summer. “They still have to be hired by the site-based council” at a
school, Rogers noted; the only difference is that schools get an added
benefit from having a bigger pool of applicants.

Regardless of how much like normal, local teachers the TFA corps members
may feel, they are still part of a national service organization and
their career tracks are different. Many are delaying six-figure
salaries. Altruism is at work here, to some extent, and the students
respect that.

“They know that the other jobs we had are higher paying, salary-wise,”
said Smith, who teaches Spanish at Lynn Camp.
But they also wonder about motives. Senorita Smith said one of her
students confronted her in class, saying: “I heard that Teach for
America teachers are only here because they think that we’re poor and
think we’re stupid and think we’re don’t wear shoes.”

Smith said she replied, “Do you really believe that I think you guys are
stupid?”
Smith’s eyes went glittery with tears for a moment in the retelling.
She says the class murmured back, “No,” and finally one found the right
words: “You wouldn’t work us so hard if you thought we were that
stupid.”

Liz Selden teaches math in Leslie County

But for many of the TFAers, the question comes up over and over.
“My kids think I’m certifiably insane for coming here,” says TFA teacher Liz Selden of Leslie County.

Her colleague, Tom Mitchell, tells me that his students thought his very
presence in Eastern Kentucky was a sure sign that he couldn’t get a job
anywhere else. “You must have done something really wrong to end up
here,” he says they told him.

The students can play the Appalachia card another way, too. TFA teacher
Marie Giezendanner said her students started out saying, “We’re from
Martin County. You can’t expect us to always do our homework. I got so
sick and tired of hearing about Martin County this, and Martin County
that, that eventually I came down pretty hard on them about it. They
don’t try that excuse so much anymore.”

When asked what causes low educational achievement in the region, TFA
teachers say it is not so much poverty as “low expectations,” and this
isn’t just armchair sociology. UK education and sociology Professor
Alan DeYoung says this is deeply rooted in the history of education in
Appalachia.

“Up until about 1960, the point of the high-school teacher in Eastern
Kentucky was to keep kids in the area, to prepare them for local jobs.
Now, it’s the opposite – it’s to equip kids to leave for college,”
DeYoung said, and he thinks the schools have been slow to catch up.

The most common question TFA teachers in Appalachia get is “Are you
going to stay?” It is often used as a “polite way to express doubts
about TFA,” says Smith. Gunn, the Morehead dean, said confidently,
“They’re not coming to Appalachia to stay, that’s for sure.”

TFA is a two-year commitment, but the hope is that many will stay
longer. “Coming into the corps, only 10 percent of corps members say
they want education to be their career,” says UK graduate Will Nash,
executive director of TFA’s Appalachia region, but “Two-thirds of all
TFA alumni who have gone through the program are currently in education,
broadly defined,” some in school administration.

Coming in, some Kentucky TFAers couldn’t imagine staying. “Now,” says
Smith, “I can’t imagine leaving.” Already, some of the corps members are
making plans for the long haul. “I’d stay at Leslie County for the
next 30 years, Lord willing,” says Selden, who is from Georgia and says
she is now “queen of [her] very own single wide” mobile home.

The short-term commitment is a common criticism, and it’s an even bigger
problem in Appalachia, Lynn Camp Principal Amy Bays said. “In our
area, kids are used to people leaving them,” she says, “so they were
especially wary of these people who would only stay for two years.”

Mitchell said likewise. “A lot of my boys don’t have stable male role
models in their life,” he says, “so they’re often looking to me to
provide guidance. I’m concerned about what happens when I’m gone.”

TFA teachers try to get their students to focus on their own futures.
They say there is one topic that is “daily conversation” in their
classes: college. But in high school and especially the middle grades,
this can seem a far-off and distant goal.
TFA teachers talk about their own experiences to make college more
attractive, and administrators like that.

Bays says students are “star struck” by the TFAers’ experiences, which
broaden their conception of what is possible. “They don’t get out of the
county much,” she said, so this is important.

Holliday agrees. “One of the things that excites me most about TFA,” he
said, “is that since TFA recruits from the top 10 percent of the top 10
percent, they’re great role models for these kids.”

But it may be more elemental than that.

It’s the last day of school in Barbourville and I’m on the bus with
Stephanie Tanner’s Spanish class. I ask them what they think of their
TFA teachers, Ms. Tanner and Mr. Roach, and I can barely hear for the
shouting.

“She’s the first Spanish teacher to stay with us for more than a year,”
says Chandler Smith, a ninth grader at Knox County High. “Only one of
them that knew how to teach, too,” another kid interjects.

At lunch, I get 20 versions of the same response: TFA teachers just know
how to connect. The same point is made more and more colorfully as I
talk to more of the students.

“They’re basically really, really, really smart teenagers who know how
to teach,” says one. “No, no, no,” another corrects him. “They just
get what we like because they like those things too,” says another. And
then, finally, “They’re great teachers for us kids because they’re
really just kids themselves.”

The teachers seem to know what they’re doing: every piece of
role-modeling is intentional, every allusion calculated. They know the
value of a good pop-culture reference and they’re not above leveraging
that if it works.

They’re scrappy educators – and scrappy is a good way of describing
their feelings about TFA’s mission, too. Over and over again in
interviews, the corps members tell me that “humility goes a long way.”
They don’t think they’re here to save Appalachia or to end poverty in
the state of Kentucky. For them, it’s much simpler than that: get the
students to learn the material – by any means necessary. That’s hard
enough. But if you can do it, TFA and its supporters believe, day after
day after day, we might just be able to close the achievement gap in
Appalachia.

State Education Commissioner Terry Holliday is
concerned about the quality of classroom instruction, especially in
Appalachian Kentucky, and he’s ready to shake things up, challenging
teachers’ colleges and local education leaders.

Comm. Terry Holliday

Eastern Kentucky colleges are producing too many teachers, and the
region’s districts are hiring too many of them, perpetuating low
expectations he says too many educators have for their students,
Holliday said in an interview.

“Admissions standards are too low” for would-be teachers, he said,
citing a report from the global consultancy McKinsey & Co., which
found that the world’s best school systems “recruit 100 percent of their
teacher corps from the top third of the academic cohort." Holliday
says, “We recruit from the bottom third right now.”

Cathy Gunn, dean of education at Morehead State University, says she
agrees that the teacher pipeline needs to be “improved and narrowed,”
but denies Morehead is recruiting from the bottom third – at least
intentionally. She says Morehead recruits “any student who is interested
in becoming a teacher, no matter where they are in their graduate
ranking,” as long as they meet the minimum requirements.

Before Holliday came to Kentucky three years ago, he was a district
superintendent in North Carolina. He said there were colleges in that
state “that we just wouldn’t hire from because they just weren’t
prepared. That’s happening to some degree in Kentucky.”

If graduates continue to perform poorly or cannot meet the new, tougher
requirements of the state Educational Professional Standards Board, he
said some of the education schools will likely have to be closed.

Teaching has changed. Decades ago, it was a primary job choice for many
talented women and minorities who lacked other opportunities. Today,
lucrative and prestigious fields such as law and medicine have opened up
their doors, while teaching has lagged behind both in pay and prestige.

The McKinsey report found low admission standards make it difficult for
teaching to be seen as prestigious, and “McKinsey is right on target
there,” Holliday said.

Encouraging better students to become teachers may be most urgent in
Appalachian Kentucky. A recent study by Dr. Eugenia Toma at the
University of Kentucky’s Martin School of Public Policy showed that
Kentucky teachers who choose to work in Appalachian schools for their
first jobs are less academically qualified than their peers who choose
to teach in other parts of the state. Toma’s paper is based on data
collected by the Educational Professional Standards Board that tracked
more than 21,000 Kentucky teachers from 1987 to the present.

Holliday’s worry is that the low quality of teachers exacerbates some
Appalachian educators’ low expectations for their students – or even
their desires for them.

“I’ve heard this more than once now, that you might not want these kids
to get a good education because then they’ll leave,” creating “less
ability to fund the local county government,” he says. That kind of
thinking “leads to low expectations for education,” he says, creating a
“vicious cycle.”

Holliday said some eastern districts “only hire from certain
universities and they only hire people from Eastern Kentucky
backgrounds.” A joint report by his Department of Education and other
state education authorities found that 43 percent of Kentucky districts
employed more than half of their teachers from the same
teacher-preparation institution, usually one nearby. (Click on map for larger image)

“People are sometimes afraid of hiring outsiders,” Holliday said, but in
doing so they miss out on many qualified candidates and diversity in
the classroom, which can help prepare students for the wider world.

These issues are most important in rural areas, which Holliday says lack
many of the amenities needed to attract talented teachers: “In urban
areas, you have places for these young, upwardly mobile teachers to
live. In rural areas, you don’t have anywhere for them to live, you
don’t have social activities, or any of the things that these young
20-somethings apparently really like,” Holliday says, playfully
acknowledging his middle age.

Holliday says reforming teacher education won’t be easy because colleges
have a financial interest in keeping class sizes high and admissions
standards low. “The highest profit margin for universities is teacher
education,” he said. “You’ve got large class sizes, very low cost for
professors.” As the state’s public universities deal with budget cuts,
“we’re gonna be pushing the presidents and the deans on this to improve
candidate quality going into these programs.”

Eastern Kentucky University’s education dean, Bill Phillips, says he
“completely agrees with Dr. Holliday” that standards need to be raised,
but says state funding cuts force EKU to be “tuition-driven.” Raising
standards lowers enrollment, and with it, tuition revenue, but Phillips
says EKU has “made the decision to raise standards and to just take the
hit on tuition.”

Holliday was interviewed for a report on the entry of Teach for America
into Appalachian Kentucky. He said TFA, which he says recruits from the
“top 10 percent of the top 10 percent” of college students, is putting
pressure on the traditional teacher preparation and certification
programs in the state: “Any time you challenge the status quo – ‘the
man’ – any time you challenge the man, you’re gonna put pressure on them
and get pushback.”

Friday, September 14, 2012

During the recently concluded presidential nominating conventions,
President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney offered
stark choices on K-12 policy while downplaying areas of agreement
between their two parties—and the tensions within each party on
education issues.

In Charlotte, N.C., last week, the Democrats put a relentless
focus on Mr. Obama's record of making education a federal funding
priority. They cited the billions of dollars his administration steered
into saving teachers' jobs and broadening college access.

And convention speakers, including U.S. Secretary of Education
Arne Duncan, highlighted the president's role in encouraging states to
adopt rigorous standards and warned that Republicans would slash
education spending.

In Tampa, Fla., the week before, Republicans picked Mr. Romney as
their standard-bearer. They pointed to Mr. Obama's lack of support for
private school choice and hammered teachers' unions as an obstruction to
the GOP vision for education reform.

But the focus on those politically charged issues, which got most
of the education airtime at each party's convention, belies the areas of
agreement between many Democrats and Republicans on policies such as
charter schools and performance pay for teachers.

And it ignores intraparty fissures that were evident behind the
scenes in both cities on such issues as common academic standards, a
topic that has split the GOP, and teacher evaluation, which has divided
Democrats.

In Charlotte, for example, Democrats gave little prime-time
attention to the politically prickly policies at the heart of President
Obama's agenda, including aggressive school turnarounds, teacher
evaluations based in part on student test scores, and charter school
expansion.

Instead, in his Sept. 6 acceptance speech, Mr. Obama declared:
"Now we have a choice—we can gut education, or we can decide that in the
United States of America, no child should have her dreams deferred
because of a crowded classroom or a crumbling school. No family should
have to set aside a college-acceptance letter because they don't have
the money."

In Tampa, the speakers who mentioned education tended to focus
primarily on school choice and what they pitched as the pernicious
influence of teachers' unions, while side-stepping politically dicey
questions such as whether there should even be a U.S. Department of
Education—an agency long opposed by many in the party.

School choice was the only K-12 issue that made its way into Mr. Romney's Aug. 30 acceptance speech.

"When it comes to the school your child should attend, every
parent should have a choice, and every child should have a chance," said
Mr. Romney, whose positions include a voucher-like proposal involving
federal special education aid and money for disadvantaged students.

DEMOCRATS:

Declare they are committed to
working with states and communities so they have flexibility and
resources to improve elementary and secondary education.

Support college- and career-ready standards.

Embrace public school options for low-income youths, including
magnet schools, charter schools, teacher-led schools, and career
academies.

Believe in “carefully crafted evaluation systems that give
struggling teachers a chance to succeed and protect due process if
another teacher has to be put in the classroom.”

Call for raising standards for the programs that prepare teachers,
recognizing and rewarding good teaching, and retaining good teachers.

Encourage colleges to keep costs down by reducing federal aid for those that do not.

REPUBLICANS:

Support school choice programs so students can attend private or out-of-district schools; back expansion of the D.C.

Opportunity Scholarship Program; support charter schools, open
enrollment policies, virtual schools, home-schooling, and local
innovations such as single-sex classes, full-day school hours, and
year-round schools.

Push accountability on the part of administrators, parents, and
teachers; back programs that support the development of character and
financial literacy; support periodic testing in math, science, reading,
history, and geography.

Support English immersion rather than bilingual education for students learning English.

Favor abstinence education.

Support legislation that changes the “highly qualified” teacher
designation, created under the No Child Left Behind Act, so that
teachers are not defined just by their degrees to the exclusion of
results in the classroom.

Say the federal government “should not be in the business of
originating student loans.” Private-sector student financing, however,
is welcome.

SOURCES: Democratic National Platform, Republican National Platform

Political Danger Zones

The focus by Democrats in Charlotte on school funding and college
access—rather than on such contentious Obama administration policies as
using student test scores as a factor in teacher evaluations—came as no
surprise to Michelle A. Rhee, the former chancellor of the District of
Columbia schools. She attended both conventions as the founder and chief
executive officer of StudentsFirst, a Sacramento, Calif.-based advocacy
organization.

For Democrats, "the safer things during campaign season to talk
about are Pell Grants, early childhood, that sort of stuff," she said in
an interview last week.

But Ms. Rhee, who is considered one of the pre-eminent voices in
the self-styled education "reformer" wing of the Democratic Party,
wasn't disheartened by the dearth of talk about charters and teacher
quality.

Mr. Obama "has raised those issues on the national stage" in the
past, including in State of the Union addresses, she said."I don't think
anybody is confused on where the president and the [education]
secretary stand," Ms. Rhee said.

President Obama steered some $100 billion to education through the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the economic-stimulus package
passed in 2009. That legislation also created the administration's
signature K-12 initiative, the Race to the Top grant competition, which
rewarded states for embracing certain education redesign principles,
such as expanding charters, turning around low-performing schools, and
raising standards. It gave states credit for adopting new
educator-evaluation systems that take student achievement into account.

Mr. Romney, for his part, proposes allowing parents to take
federal Title I money for disadvantaged children and aid for students in
special education that now flows to districts to any school they
choose, including a private school. And the former governor and business
executive has sought to use transparency for student results as the
main lever in school improvement—rather than requiring schools to set
achievement goals, as the Obama administration has done.

But Mr. Romney has stopped short of calling for dismantling the
federal Education Department, and he hasn't spoken out against the
Common Core State Standards, which are a thorn in the side of many
conservatives.

'Being a Leader'

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Mr. Romney's most visible surrogate
on education—he made education the theme of his speech to the Tampa
delegates—brushed off the notion that the Republican nominee, if
elected, will be hampered on K-12 issues by the more conservative wing
of the party.

"I think he can just be president. That's part of being a leader,"
Mr. Bush said in an interview. "You're never going to satisfy every
person on every issue; you can earn people's respect and support."

Mr. Bush, who has praised Mr. Obama's pick for education
secretary, cited Mr. Romney's support for school choice as the key
difference between the two candidates when it comes to K-12. He said
during a panel discussion on education in Tampa that there aren't as
many distinctions between the two candidates on school policy as there
are on most other issues.

"We're in this climate of negativity, and there may be more agreement here than people want to admit," he said.

Mr. Bush even had kind words for the Race to the Top, which was
only a bit player in Charlotte and isn't mentioned in the Democrats'
official platform. The former Florida governor didn't mention the
program by name, but praised the Obama administration's "incentives for
nonreform-minded states."

Highlighting Differences

But Jon Schnur, an education adviser to the Obama campaign, threw
cold water on the idea that Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama would govern
similarly on K-12 issues.

Dueling Policy Positions

As Democrats and Republicans gathered to nominate their
presidential candidates, each party also adopted a platform of policy
priorities. Among their education positions:

"They represent dramatically different visions and
priorities," Mr. Schnur said in an email. "When you look at Romney's
education and budget proposals, they just represent a dramatically
smaller focus on education—with reduced access to college, reduced
funding for our schools, and reduced accountability and reform to
improve our schools."

In fact, much of the education rhetoric on the Democratic
convention floor was devoted to warnings of cuts to education programs
if voters elect Mr. Romney and his running mate, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of
Wisconsin and the author of an austere budget blueprint.

The cuts in the Ryan budget, which have been highlighted in a
number of Obama campaign commercials airing in swing states, were a big
focus of Secretary Duncan's convention speech.
"In order to cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires, Governor
Romney will cut education for our children," Mr. Duncan told the crowd.
"That's the difference in this election. They see education as an
expense. President Obama sees it as an investment."

But Republicans note that the Ryan budget proposal, which has been
passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, isn't specific on spending
levels for individual K-12 programs. Instead, it calls for a 20 percent
reduction in domestic discretionary spending, the broad category that
includes education. That cut would likely put major pressure on federal
spending for schools.

Still, the Romney team has sought to distance the GOP nominee from the proposal.

"The Ryan plan is not Romney's plan," Phil Handy, one of Mr.
Romney's education co-chairs, said in an interview. "We certainly didn't
specify anything like that in our plan."

Mr. Ryan's own speech to his party's convention called for a major
slimming-down of government spending. But the House Budget Committee
chairman was silent on just how his plan would affect education.

And while he chastised the Obama administration for its economic
policies, he didn't single out the president's record of steering
significant aid to K-12 education.

Secretary Duncan, like other speakers in Charlotte, including
former President Bill Clinton, also drew attention to President Obama's
record on higher education access, a clear nod to the pivotal role that
college students and their parents could play in the Nov. 6 election.
During his term, Mr. Obama has revamped the student-lending program so
that all loans originate through the U.S. Treasury, instead of through
subsidized private lenders. And the administration greatly expanded the
Pell Grant program, which helps low-income students attend college.

By contrast, Rep. Ryan's budget blueprint says that federal
expansion of student aid may actually have an adverse impact on college
costs, since it does nothing to encourage universities to keep tuition
low. His budget seeks to curb the Pell Grant program and refocus the
grants on the neediest students.

Rallying Their Bases

Both presidential nominees have had difficulty leveraging their positions on K-12 to rally their respective party bases.

Many teachers' union members in Charlotte, for example, voiced
disappointment in Mr. Obama's support for tying teacher evaluations
partly to student test scores. But they still were planning to provide
him with get-out-the-vote muscle, partly because they think they'd be
much worse off under a Romney administration.

"It's a mixed bag," Linda Myers, who recently retired from her
work with the Michigan Education Association, an affiliate of the
National Education Association, said of the Obama education record. "But
he's willing to listen [to unions]. With our options, he's the best guy
for the job."

The party faithful in Tampa were also able to rally to Mr.
Romney's defense, even if they wished he'd take a bolder stance on K-12
issues.

South Carolina state Sen. Mike Fair would have liked to see Mr.
Romney's campaign propose the elimination of the federal department, and
he would have liked the candidate to come out against the common-core
standards. But, on balance, he thinks the Republican would be much
better for the nation than Mr. Obama.

"Am I disappointed that [Mr. Romney] didn't come out blasting
against common core? No. We need jobs," said Mr. Fair, an alternate
delegate.

If people in Jefferson County aren’t paying attention to the upcoming school board election, the time to start was yesterday.

Actually, make that Sunday — when The Courier-Journal
provided a detailed look at 15 candidates running for three open seats.
The report should serve as a jarring wake-up call for anyone feeling
complacent about public education in this community.

At
least six of the candidates are running with a goal of scrapping the
current student diversity plan and returning to neighborhood schools,
guaranteeing students the right to attend the public school closest to
their homes. Five of the 15 candidates support a diversity plan, which
considers factors such as race, income and educational levels in making
student assignments.

The remaining four are undecided or did not respond for the Sunday piece by Courier-Journal reporter Antoinette Konz.

With
three of the seven school board seats on the ballot, it’s apparent that
this election will influence whether the community moves ahead with a
diversity plan that offers students a fair shot at success and
achievement or whether Jefferson County returns to an insular and
segregated school system of the past.

Voters
who live in the districts up for grabs, need to start taking a close
look at the candidates, and not just vote for whichever names they see
on yard signs. Many of the 15 bear closer scrutiny.For
example, do voters in the mid-county’s 2nd District really want to
elect a guy who was such a rabid opponent of court-ordered busing that
he changed his name to George “Stop the Bus” Tolhurst — and who also
wants to end fluoridation of public water?

Do
they want people with longstanding past ties to the school system and
possibly past baggage, such as former high school principal James
Sexton, or former school system administrator Martin Bell, both running
in southeast Jefferson County’s 7th District?

Do voters in southwestern Jefferson County’s 4th District understand they have six candidates running for school board and that just a very few votes could determine the outcome of that race?

And do voters realize that each of the three districts has candidates
who glibly endorse a return to the neighborhood schools of yesteryear
although — philosophical objections aside — yesteryear no longer exists
because of major population shifts?

Several
members who remain on the board — Debbie Wesslund, Linda Duncan and
Carol Ann Haddad — traveled to Frankfort last year to offer compelling
arguments against an ill-advised Senate bill that would have forced
Jefferson County to return to a neighborhood school system.

(They, along with board Chairwoman Diane Porter, support the district diversity plan.)

Foremost
was their concern that the bill, which failed, would return Jefferson
County to a system of segregated schools. But a practical and compelling
argument is that because of major population changes of the past
several decades, there simply aren’t enough schools in some areas and
too many in others.

A
sudden return to neighborhood schools could result in the absurd
outcome of closing schools in some neighborhoods and forcing costly
construction or expansion of schools in others. Some people are grousing
about a recent tax hike by the school system. How do they think
Jefferson County would finance an abrupt school construction boom?

School
board members also must confront other controversial issues. Should the
evaluation of the superintendent be public or private? What should be
done about failing schools? How can the school system improve student
achievement and should teacher pay be tied to student success?

All of these are serious questions that deserve significant voter attention.

Most of the candidates appear to have strong opinions on these and other issues. Voters may find them online at courier-journal.com or at other sites, such as candidate web pages or Facebook pages.

Aspiring
board members will be invited to appear at candidate forums within
their districts as the Nov. 6 election approaches, forums which are open
to the public.

Yet, school board races tend to be ho-hum events, not high on the public radar.

It
is very important that voters figure out whether they live in the 2nd,
4th or 7th District and, if so, which candidate they prefer and why.

And
we’re not just talking public school parents here. Public education
affects nearly every facet of the community, including the workforce,
business recruitment, prosperity and independence from social services
and public assistance.

Voters
need to get involved, get informed and vote on Nov. 6 for a school
board candidate who reflects what they want this community to become.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Large-scale cheating has been uncovered over the last year
at some of the nation's most competitive schools, like Stuyvesant High
School in Manhattan, the Air Force Academy and, most recently, Harvard.

Studies
of student behavior and attitudes show that a majority of students
violate standards of academic integrity to some degree, and that high
achievers are just as likely to do it as others. Moreover, there is
evidence that the problem has worsened over the last few decades.

Experts
say the reasons are relatively simple: Cheating has become easier and
more widely tolerated, and both schools and parents have failed to give
students strong, repetitive messages about what is allowed and what is
prohibited.

"I don't think there's any question that
students have become more competitive, under more pressure, and, as a
result, tend to excuse more from themselves and other students, and
that's abetted by the adults around them," said Donald L. McCabe, a
professor at the Rutgers University Business School, and a leading
researcher on cheating.

"There have always been
struggling students who cheat to survive," he said. "But more and more,
there are students at the top who cheat to thrive."

Internet
access has made cheating easier, enabling students to connect instantly
with answers, friends to consult and works to plagiarize. And
generations of research has shown that a major factor in unethical
behavior is simply how easy or hard it is.

A recent
study by Jeffrey A. Roberts and David M. Wasieleski at Duquesne
University found that the more online tools college students were
allowed to use to complete an assignment, the more likely they were to
copy the work of others.

The Internet has changed
attitudes, as a world of instant downloading, searching, cutting and
pasting has loosened some ideas of ownership and authorship. An
increased emphasis on having students work in teams may also have played
a role.

"Students are surprisingly unclear about what
constitutes plagiarism or cheating," said Mr. Wasieleski, an associate
professor of management.

Responding to a cheating scandal at Harvard, renowned developmental
psychologist Howard Gardner worries that elite students' relentless
drive for success, fueled by what he refers to as "market ways of
thinking," has crippled their moral sense. He reports on a study on career ambitions he and colleagues conducted through interviews with top students:

Over and over again, students told us that they admired good work and
wanted to be good workers. But they also told us they wanted—ardently—to
be successful. They feared that their peers were cutting corners and
that if they themselves behaved ethically, they would be bested. And so,
they told us in effect, "Let us cut corners now and one day, when we
have achieved fame and fortune, we'll be good workers and set a good
example." A classic case of the ends justify the means.

In discussing the firing of a dean who lied about her academic qualifications, no student supported the firing. The most common responses were “She’s doing a good job, what’s the problem?” and “Everyone lies on their résumé.”

In a discussion of the documentary “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” students were asked what they thought of the company traders who manipulated the price of energy. No student condemned the traders; responses varied from caveat emptor to saying it’s the job of the governor or the state assembly to monitor the situation.

One clue to the troubling state of affairs came from a Harvard
classmate who asked me: “Howard, don’t you realize that Harvard has
always been primarily about one thing — success?” The students admitted
to Harvard these days have watched their every step, lest they fail in
their goal of admission to an elite school. But once admitted, they
begin to look for new goals, and being a successful scholar is usually
not high on the list. What is admired is success on Wall Street, Silicon
Valley, Hollywood — a lavish lifestyle that, among other things, allows
you to support your alma mater and get the recognition that follows.

As
for those students who do have the scholarly bent, all too often they
see professors cut corners — in their class attendance, their attention
to student work and, most flagrantly, their use of others to do
research. Most embarrassingly, when professors are caught — whether in
financial misdealings or even plagiarizing others’ work — there are
frequently no clear punishments. If punishments ensue, they are kept
quiet, and no one learns the lessons that need to be learned.

Whatever
happens to those guilty of cheating, many admirable people are likely
to be tarred by their association with Harvard. That’s the cost of being
a flagship institution. Yet this scandal can have a positive outcome if
leaders begin a searching examination of the messages being conveyed to
our precious young people and then do whatever it takes to make those
messages ones that lead to lives genuinely worthy of admiration.

Murray State University has changed its policy for guns on campus to
require everyone but uniformed personnel to leave weapons inside their
cars.

The move made last week came in the wake of a Kentucky
Supreme Court decision in April saying the University of Kentucky
improperly fired student from an on-campus job for having a gun in his
car. The high court allowed guns in vehicles, but said universities may
still regulate deadly weapons elsewhere on campus.

Murray State
University General Counsel John Rall told The Murray Ledger & Times that if a person does not have a permit to carry a
concealed weapon, the weapon must be placed somewhere in the vehicle
where it is visible.

Saturday, September 08, 2012

Here's one analysis of Obama/Romney Education policies. It's pretty good except for that one big glaring exception: the analysis fails to point out the biggest difference between the two. Romney favors vouchers which would seriously undermine public school budgets. Obama does not. Still, viewing the policies from the micro and macro levels is helpful.

If we elect a president to look out for the interests of all students, one direction is strongly suggested.

If we prefer a president who would look out for individual interests, another choice is indicated.

The last two weeks have been the Democrats’ and Republicans’
opportunity to explain to the nation how our country would operate under
two very different schools of political thought...

As each party’s candidates and supporters laid out their respective
party’s positions on the economy, health care, international relations,
and women’s rights, we were offered the choice between President Barack
Obama and Governor Mitt Romney.

But one issue, however, that was not extensively discussed was
Obama’s and Romney’s education priorities. Each candidate – and,
subsequently, each party – has a very different view of education and
what our nation’s policies should be moving forward to make our
education system stronger and more robust.

Romney, on one hand, takes a more conservative, micro-level approach
to education while his presidential counterpart has a more
"bigger-government-is-better" approach to dealing with our educational
crisis.

If given control of the White House, whose policies would be better
for our country? ...

Mitt Romney's Micro Conservatism

Mitt Romney takes a very classic conservative and business-like
approach to education. Competition and innovative would probably be the
best words to describe his thinking around education and his key
education positions include charter schools, school choice, and
vouchers...

The argument for Mitt Romney:

At the most micro of levels (students and families), charter schools,
school choice, and vouchers are absolutely wonderful. For a family with
very limited options for good schools in their local district, offering
any alternative is very much welcomed. There are many communities in
our nation suffering from sub-par public schools, and giving that
student, that family, that community a sense of hope and the option to
choose something different (and hopefully better) is sound policy.

An Argument against Mitt Romney:

As stated above, charter schools, school choice, and vouchers operate
at the most micro of levels, meaning that if our priority as a nation
is to overhaul and change an entire education system, these tenets do
not nearly go far enough. Offering an alternative to public schools –
which unfortunately, many times, means closing down schools that have
been staples in communities for decades – without paying particular
attention to how poverty, unemployment, hopelessness, discrimination,
and segregation all interact with each other to create conditions where
public schools are doomed to fail is pure folly.

And specifically with charter schools, one problem is that they are
all vastly different. All charters are not uniform in quality, and that
reality dramatically plays itself out in communities that are yearning for high-quality schools. Some charters are doing extremely well, while others, unfortunately, are not doing so well.

Barack Obama's Macro Liberalism

President Obama has made it perfectly clear that investing in community colleges is a key component of his education platform. He has also implemented the hugely controversial federal
initiative/competition, "Race to the Top," where the federal government
has challenged states (with the enticement of some very generous
federal dollars) to outline their education reform efforts in an attempt
to spark innovation and a renewed focus on education reform at the
state level.

The Argument for Barack Obama:

Not many people can argue with the statistics that show the correlation between one’s education level and increase in earnings. With this new 21st century,
post-industrial age that we are currently privileged to be living in,
increased educational attainment is paramount for anyone in this country
that is serious about his or her economic well-being (not to mention
staying employed). RTTT, as Race to the Top is affectionately
abbreviated, has placed education reform at the forefront of states’
priorities.

An Argument against Barack Obama and His Thinking around Education:

A big argument against RTTT is that the federal government is grossly overstepping its
boundaries when it comes to states’ rights. Traditionally, federal
dollars have provided only a small portion of states’ overall education
budgets (typically less than 10%). So for the federal government to
demand schools to conform to the federal government’s idea of education
reform – including the expansion of charter schools, which hasn’t proven
to be the panacea, yet, that many were hoping for – and to tie federal
dollars to that definition, some feel that the amount of money given to
states does not necessarily add up to the amount of influence they
should have on states’ affairs, which is a particularly thorny issue for
many.

So, Who Offers a Better Plan?

Overall, Obama’s guiding principles are better for our nation’s
future if we are thinking about education reform from a more macro
level. With RTTT and investments in postsecondary education, he offers a
plan focused more on moving our entire educational system forward.
Conversely, Romney, with his guiding principles being competition and
school choice, his reform efforts will only go so far in effecting
change at a broad level.

A philanthropist, one of America’s wealthiest men, was worried about
faculty pensions. The solution he successfully pushed, with the largesse
of his foundation, led to the creation of the credit hour, which has
become higher education’s de facto standard unit of measuring academic
work.

Andrew Carnegie never intended for the time-based credit hour to be used to measure student learning, according to a new report
from the New America Foundation and Education Sector, which tracks the
standard’s history. But it has become a measure and a proxy for what
students are supposedly learning.

An over-reliance on the credit hour, which links the awarding of
academic credit to hours of contact between professors and students, has
led to many of higher education’s problems, according to the report.

“There is pretty compelling evidence that what we have right now
isn’t working,” said Amy Laitinen, deputy director for higher education
at the New America Foundation and the report’s author.

One obvious concern is that colleges often reject transfer credits,
wasting students’ money and time, in part because they don’t trust what
constitutes a credit hour at another institution, according to the
report.

The credit hour can also stymie innovation. For example, it is
difficult to apply the "seat-time" standard to online classes, which are
typically less tied to class time but are an important and rapidly
growing element of higher education, the report says. Competency-based
education, in which students learn at their own pace, is also a bad fit with the credit hour. So, too, is prior-learning assessment, where students can earn credit for learning outside of college, like training on the job or in the military.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching warned about
the inadequacy of the credit hour back in 1906, shortly after the
standard was established.

After all, Carnegie’s original motivation had nothing to do with
college-level learning, according to the report. He wanted to create a
free pension plan for underpaid professors, so they could retire at a
reasonable age. In order to opt in, the foundation required colleges to
sign on to a time-based standard to address another issue: college
admissions requirements. More high school graduates were applying to
colleges, and the new “Carnegie Unit” was an easy way to measure how
much time high school students spent in each subject.

Colleges followed suit by converting their own course offerings into
time-based units, and ignored the foundation’s warnings about the credit
hour’s utility. The result is a standard of one credit hour for each
hour of faculty-student contact time per week over a 15-week semester,
with most bachelor degrees weighing in at 120 credits.

That standard falls short, according to the report, because the credit hour does not measure learning...

Perhaps more revealing are the issues on which our nation agrees. We
agree we need to close the achievement gap, support schools in urban
areas, and do something about the lack of financial support plaguing our
schools.

In fact, the poll showed lack of funding for education as the No. 1
concern of parents, outdistancing the top response from 10 years ago,
drugs and violence in schools. Nationally, 35 percent of responses cited
lack of funding as the biggest challenge facing their schools. Among
public school parents, 43 percent cited funding as the biggest
challenge. Regretfully, the challenge will loom even larger if the $1.2
trillion in across-the-board cuts Congress agreed to in last summer's
debt limit deal materialize this coming January. "Sequestration" would
have a potentially devastating impact on public education funding, and
would disproportionately affect high need districts already struggling
to do much more with far less. Our public education system is facing a
very frightening and very real reality.

What's worse is that lack of funding contributes to so many of the
other issues affecting student achievement, whether it's the achievement
gap, the dropout rate or even the nutritional value of school lunches.
It's no wonder that 70 percent of respondents support giving parents
whose children attend a failing school the option of mounting a petition
drive to request removal of the teachers and principal.

Enrollment is up. Need is up. Resources are down. With so many
struggles, parents and communities must be empowered to drive change,
but until education funding becomes a top priority in state capitals and
on Capitol Hill, parents need to think beyond their individual
communities and advocate for all children in every district,
across their state and across the nation. The challenges that parents
face are shared, as should be fighting for the solutions...

Schools have been open for a couple of weeks across much of Florida,
but not all of the students know who their teachers are yet. There's
typically a lot of teacher turnover during the summer break, and schools
can't always get vacant teaching positions filled by the time school
starts.

At DeSoto County High School in
southern Florida, math tutor Ronnie Padilla is filling in as the French
teacher. There's only one problem: He doesn't speak any French. Across
from his classroom, Alma Cendejas — the school's front-desk receptionist
— is filling in as the Spanish teacher until the school can find one.

Principals
across Florida say the summer break just isn't enough time to fill
every open teaching position. Miami-Dade County Schools, for example,
started about 100 teachers short. School officials say that's not
unusual for large school districts with tens of thousands of teachers —
Miami-Dade has 22,000.

Still, the vacancies
mean that thousands of students are starting the school year without
permanent teachers. In a school year that is only 180 days long and
filled with high-stakes tests, these students are getting a late start...

With three years of teaching under her belt, Allison Frieze nearly
qualifies as a grizzled veteran. The 28-year-old special education
teacher at E.L. Haynes Public Charter School here already has more
experience than the typical U.S. teacher.

She remembers her first year and says no new
teacher really wants to relive that. "You have so many pressures on you
and you're kind of swimming, trying to keep your head above water with
all of the things you have to do," Frieze says.

Research
suggests that parents this fall are more likely than ever to find that
their child's teachers are relatively new to the profession, and
possibly very young.

Recent findings by Richard Ingersoll at the University of Pennsylvania
show that as teacher attrition rates have risen, from about 10% to 13%
for first-year teachers, schools are having to hire large numbers of new
teachers. Between 40% to 50% of those entering the profession now
leave within five years in what Ingersoll calls a "constant
replenishment of beginners."

The end result: a
more than threefold increase in the sheer number of inexperienced
teachers in U.S. schools. In the 1987-88 school year, Ingersoll
estimates, there were about 65,000 first-year teachers; by 2007-08, the
number had grown to more than 200,000. In the 1987-88 school year, he
found, the biggest group of teachers had 15 years of experience. By the
2007-08 school year, the most recent data available, the biggest group
of teachers had one year experience....

Ivonne Beegle became the first Hispanic female
principal in Fayette County, in 2007, when the former Spanish teacher and
specialist in English as a second language was named Principal at Cardinal Valley
Elementary. Beegle told the Herald-Leader she hoped to create a plan of checks and balances for
the school that was systemic, "so that we can ensure that every child
reaches proficiency."

The principal and the academic dean at Lexington's Cardinal
Valley Elementary School have been placed on paid administrative leave
as a result of allegations of misconduct, the Fayette Public Schools
said Tuesday.

School district spokeswoman Lisa Deffendall said
that an investigation is under way, and that she could provide few other
details.

Tuesday was the first day that Principal Ivonne Beegle and Academic Dean Suzanne Ray have been off work, Deffendall said.

Cardinal
Valley has been one of the Fayette Schools' brightest spots on state
tests over the past few years, recording significant gains in student
achievement.

Defendall said Tuesday that she couldn't discuss the
type of misconduct alleged. But in answer to questions, she said the
allegations do not involve individual students or school finances.

"We just started the investigation," Deffendall said. "All we know at this point is what I have shared with you."

Barbara
Albaugh, a retired former principal, will fill in at Cardinal Valley
starting Wednesday, Deffendall said. The district also will provide
other administrative support at the school if needed.

Faculty and
staffers at Cardinal Valley were notified of the situation in a meeting
Tuesday morning, Deffendall said. Letters also were sent home to parents
on Tuesday.

It is unclear how long the investigation might continue.

Deffendall
said the school district normally places people on administrative leave
for up to 20 days, although it can extend that period or cut it short.

more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/09/04/2323117/cardinal-valley-principal-academic.html#storylink=cpy

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KSN&C is intended to be a place for well-reasoned civil discourse...not to suggest that we don’t appreciate the witty retort or pithy observation. Have at it. But we do not invite the anonymous flaming too often found in social media these days. This is a destination for folks to state your name and speak your piece.

It is important to note that, while the Moderator serves as Faculty Regent for Eastern Kentucky University, all comments offered by the Moderator on KSN&C are his own opinions and do not necessarily represent the views of the Board of Regents, the university administration, faculty, or any members of the university community.

On KSN&C, all authors are responsible for their own comments. See full disclaimer at the bottom of the page.

Why This Blog?

So far as we know, we only get one lifetime. So, when I "retired" in 2004, after 31-years in public education I wanted to do something different. I wanted to teach, write and become a student again. I have since spent a decade in higher ed.

I have listened to so many commentaries over the years about what should be done to improve Kentucky's schools - written largely by folks who have never tried to manage a classroom, run a school, or close an achievement gap. I came to believe that I might have something to offer.

I moved, in 1985, from suburban northern Kentucky to what was then the state’s flagship district - Fayette County. I have had a unique set of experiences to accompany my journey through KERA’s implementation. I have seen children grow to graduate and lead successful lives. I have seen them go to jail and I have seen them die. I have been amazed by brilliant teachers, dismayed by impassive bureaucrats, disappointed by politicians and uplifted by some of Kentucky’s finest school children. When I am not complaining about it, I will attest that public school administration is critically important work.

Democracy is run by those who show up. In our system of government every citizen has a voice, but only if they choose to use it.

This blog is totally independent; not supported or sponsored by any institution or political organization. I will make every effort to fully cite (or link to) my sources. Please address any concerns to the author.

On the campaign trail...with my wife Rita

An action shot: The Principal...as a much younger man.

Faculty Senate Chair

Serving as Mace Bearer during the Inauguration of Michael T. Benson as EKU's 12th president.

Teaching

EDF 203 in EKU's one-room schoolhouse.

Professin'

Lecturing on the history of Berea College to Berea faculty and staff, 2014.

Faculty Regent

One in a long series of meetings. 2016

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